Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, at Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 7, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

When Katsumi Shiba decided to open a plant nursery on a piece of former lemon grove in Upland, the Japanese-American man drew inspiration from the view to the north.

Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, at Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, holds an old photo of him with son, Caleb, and his late father, Katsumi, at Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

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Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, right, helps out a customer at Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, left, with manager, Hodge Morioka, 80, stand before a greeting sign at the front of Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

The original Mount Fuji Garden Center sign at the front corner of the business in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, at Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Owner Lindsay Shiba, 59, at Mount Fuji Garden Center in Upland on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Mount Fuji Garden Center will soon close after 53 years in business. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

“He thought that mountain back there, when snow-covered, looked like Mount Fuji,” said his son, Lindsay.

And so it was in 1965 that Mt. Fuji Garden Center was born. The elder Shiba operated it until his 2007 retirement. The younger Shiba, who’d worked at the nursery since the 1970s, took it over for a seamless transition.

But the hardy perennial is going to be uprooted.

Shiba and his two siblings have sold the 2.5 acres to developer GFR Homes, which plans 37 condominiums. A closeout sale is expected to begin June 16. The business may close by the end of July.

“It’s going to disappear, unfortunately,” said Shiba, 59, who would have liked to continue a few more years. “This is the only job I’ve ever known.”

He’s been telling customers the past couple of weeks that he’ll be closing. One suggested he alert me. (She has my thanks.) And so Wednesday morning found me pulling into 1555 W. Foothill Blvd. to meet Shiba and hear about the business.

It was my first time there. As a renter and non-gardener, the only dirt I have is on local politicos. But I’d driven past the Garden Center hundreds of times, admiring the quaint sign with chop-suey lettering suspended between wooden supports. The sign, there since the mid-1970s, is meant to resemble a traditional Japanese gate known as a torii, Shiba explained.

The business and its lush greenery got a little hemmed-in when a condominium project was built to the east. A storage facility is on the west and wraps around the back.

Shiba said his father hadn’t minded. “He knew it would help increase the value of the property,” Shiba said.

Katsumi Shiba had grown up in California’s Central Valley and was among those interned during World War II in the camp in Poston, Ariz. Perhaps the only positive thing to come out of that experience is that he met a young woman, Keiko.

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After the war, the sympathetic owner of a frozen food plant in New Jersey, Seabrook Farms, hired many former internees, among them Katsumi and Keiko. (To win over a prejudiced community, the owner cleverly paid his employees in silver dollars a couple of times so merchants could see how the wages circulated.) The pair got to know each other better and married.

In the 1950s, with two children, the couple moved to Southern California, where he had a cousin in San Dimas who owned a nursery. Katsumi attended Cal Poly Pomona to study horticulture and opened Mt. Fuji in Upland, which was a respectful distance from his cousin’s business.

“At that time it was all lemon groves and fields,” Lindsay recalled. “It was on the outskirts of Upland, the tules of Upland. Everything built up around him.”

To drum up business, Katsumi at first would not only sell plants but sketch out a landscape design for customers for free, hiring gardeners to do the installation. Within a few years, he started charging for design services.

“I still have customers who say, ‘Your dad designed my landscaping in 1967 and I still have it,’” Shiba said.

Katsumi “was a lot of fun to work with,” said Hodge Morioka, 80, who has been at Mt. Fuji some 43 years. “I don’t think he had any temper at all. He was social too.”

Katsumi did his best to spread Japanese culture: From 1978 to 1986 he also owned what may have been the first Japanese restaurant in the area, Kyoto Gardens, which was in the castle-shaped building in Pomona that later became Friar Tuck’s.

A fading, hand-painted sign over the Mt. Fuji entrance advises customers to be patient. If no one is available immediately to help, “come in, have some coffee, brouse (sic) around and feel free to serve yourself.”

Lindsay began working at the nursery on weekends and summers as a boy. His older siblings had done the same and kind of hated it. When it was his turn, his father may have taken a gentler approach. “I’d water plants, go with him to pick up supplies, carry out things for customers,” he said. “I just liked plants.”

He was hooked when his father gave him African violet leaf cuttings, put them in soil and showed him how to care for them. By junior high, he knew what he wanted to do in life. After graduating from Upland High, he studied horticulture at Cal Poly Pomona and joined the family business, where his father taught him about bonsai, the small ornamental tree on which Lindsay became a sought-after teacher.

We walked around the property, which stretches far back from the street and ends in a former growing area and a metal shed. The property also holds a greenhouse, likewise little used now. But houseplants, flowers, palms and fruit trees, some under a shade canopy, are neatly lined up out back. A hummingbird shot past me.

“We used to be among the largest rose growers in the area,” Shiba said, but that dried up, pretty much literally, with the drought. He pointed to a section of drought-tolerant plants and said, “We’ve had to change with the times.”

A farewell guestbook for customers already has a few entries. One customer wrote that she lives by a chain nursery but makes the drive to Mt. Fuji. “Your business has been an honest and stable service to Upland,” wrote another. “40 years of knowledge, quality, beauty!!!” wrote a third.

Plans for the condos are under review by Upland planners and will go to the Planning Commission in July or August for review of the tract map, site plan and design, according to senior contract planner Jerry Guarracino. He said the two-story condos will look like a continuation of the two condo projects to the east.

I hope the landscaping is nice.

David Allen is planted on Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook, follow @davidallen909 on Twitter and buy “Getting Started” and “Pomona A to Z.”

Since 1997, David Allen has been taking up valuable newsprint and pixels at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, where he is a columnist and blogger (insidesocal.com/davidallen). Among his specialties: city council meetings, arts and culture, people, places, local history, dining and a log in a field that resembled the Loch Ness monster. The Illinois native has spent his newspaper career in California, starting in 1987 at the Santa Rosa News-Herald and continuing at the Rohnert Park-Cotati Clarion, Petaluma Argus-Courier and Victor Valley Daily Press. A resident of Claremont who roots for the St. Louis Cardinals and knows far too much about Marvel Comics, the Kinks and Frank Zappa's Inland Valley years, he is the author of two collections of columns: 'Pomona A to Z' and 'Getting Started.'